Faerie Blood (32 page)

The power that Christopher summoned flared out from us both, straining against the chains and the starlight circle that kept us bound. I felt strong and vital enough to snap the chains with my bare hands, and for a lone wild instant I thought that it might work, that we might set ourselves free—

But Malandor’s own magic still rushed forth from his glowing hands, like flames along an oil slick, pressing us down hard beneath its intangible weight and choking off speech within our throats. “Great Azganaroth,” he cried to the hulking being before him, his face ablaze with dreadful purpose, “I implore you to accept these lives, this blood, which I have brought you! Look with favor upon your supplicant, Ancient Mother, and reopen the gate of life’s beginning to the unborn souls of my House!”

The demon roared once more, flinging arms each as broad around as Christopher’s entire body out in challenge. Six clawed fingers on each of her hands splayed wide, and her thick serpentine tail lashed back and forth.

THE CAUSE THAT CLOSED THE GATE WAS JUST. THE MATE OF SHE WHO MADE THE PLEA WAS SLAIN; FURTHER LIVES FROM HER WOMB WERE DENIED HER.

I froze even as Christopher’s power built to a crescendo behind, beneath, and within me, urging my own magic up and out of my blood to join it—the magic I’d inherited from my mother. Was that thing talking about my mother?

What had Elanna done?

Malandor’s face contorted, his expression cracking like a broken mask and showing a glimpse beneath it of a soul-corroding grief. “Where is the justice, great Azganaroth?” he howled. “There is no justice in the death of
my
mate and of the child within
her
womb!”

YOUR MATE FOR YOUR SISTER’S MATE
, the entity thundered.
IT IS JUST.

“My child was innocent, a life already conceived, and there was no justice in her death!” my uncle screamed, his head held high, proud, and terrible. “You speak of justice—I call for it now! Her child for mine!”

That was a cue to do something if I’d ever heard one. Within physical and magical chains I writhed, striving to wrestle past the panic and terror that threatened to overwhelm me as thoroughly as Malandor’s thrall. All around me the wave of energy out of Christopher gathered till it felt as though I sat in an ocean of summer, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the energy roiling up from within me in reply latch onto it as we’d done to raise the Wards on my house. Not without my hands being free, and my hands were chained up tight.

Then Elessir stirred and opened his eyes. His dark head jerked in several directions, first upward and then back and forth as he tried to get a bead on what was happening. As fury, pain, and surprise all flared across his face, I nudged him hard with one knee to get his attention. With no time to spare, I took the chance that if Malandor had betrayed him, the singer would defect to the home team. I mouthed ‘help’ at him when his dazed eyes met mine.

Later, I’d worry about kicking his ass.

Just as my uncle screeched out his challenge to Azganaroth Elessir flung himself at my side, almost between Christopher and me. He craned his head in close to both of us, whispering hoarsely, “I trust you will both take this as the most platonic of gestures.”

Then he threw an arm around each one of us, grabbing my bound hands in his left one, Christopher’s in his right. When his hands connected with ours, it was as though we were the batteries of a pair of cars and the Unseelie the jumper cable. Power surged. Mine welled up out of me in a flickering wave of white as I fought to marshal my senses. Elessir’s came in cool and blue, moonlight across a midnight sky, and it locked onto mine to wing it headlong into the green-golden fire that roared forth from Christopher.

I felt the chains around me heat to an unbearable degree; then, before they had time to do more than singe my arms and shirt, they exploded. Twisted shards of silver went flying. So did Elessir, who was flung back hard into one side of the circle that surrounded us all, and he cried out as his collision with that barrier of power drove Tarrant’s dagger further into his back. The circle pulsed in reaction to our rising power and rippled with the impact of the Unseelie’s body, but it held fast. Elessir did not. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell over sideways into a heap.

Melisanda instinctively dodged, though none of the fragments of chain escaped the circle and only enough power to stagger her a little leaked out. Tarrant shouted out her name, though, and my uncle screamed back at him, “Hold your place! Keep our gate open!”

“Kendis!” Christopher made my name a prayer of desperation while he whirled around, grabbed me, pulled me against him, and leaped to his feet all in one fluid sequence of motion.

But he had no time to do anything else. Even as we scrambled up off the ground the demon spun around to face us, with enough speed that her tail or the stiff, straight mane that ran from her skull down to the small of her back would have bisected anything closer to her. She was no less daunting from a standing perspective than she was from the ground; I looked up and up into her inhuman, fiery eyes. And I grabbed Christopher just as tightly as he’d grabbed me, completely and unabashedly terrified.

Because you know what? The troll on Burke-Gilman had been frightening, but the demon right in front of me, looking poised to take my uncle up on his revolutionary new demon diet plan, was immeasurably worse. I tried to smack at her with my infant magic as I’d smacked at the Sidhe, Christopher’s power lending me extra strength, but she didn’t budge an inch.

From somewhere far off to the right, two shafts of light fell across Azganaroth’s enormous form, beams that might have been searchlights or headlights—but I didn’t look to see if someone or something else was coming as the demon commanded every iota of my attention. Christopher and I clung to one another, our merged magic shining in a shield before us, but I didn’t think we’d hold the entity back for more than a second. Maybe two.

But she didn’t spring for the attack.

Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Malandor’s two followers double-taking; Melisanda then pivoted round to shriek a warning to my uncle. But I couldn’t hear it. Nor could I hear any engines of vehicles as Azganaroth roared a fourth time, with a volume that almost drove Christopher and me to our knees.

THE SACRIFICES ARE UNWILLING.

“Damn straight we’re unwilling!” I shouted. At least I thought I did. My ears—hell, my whole head rang so much in the wake of that roar that I could barely hear myself think, much less shout. But I felt my lungs and throat work, hurling out air and words towards the being looming before us.

And I felt Christopher’s magic, blazing like a hearth fire, filling my senses with echoes of Seattle: brilliantly sunny spring and summer mornings, the crisp, blue-gray peaks of the Olympics and the Cascades and Mount Rainier rising majestically to the southeast, the autumn and winter rains that rinsed everything clean and wrapped the city in clouds and mist. As he looked down at me with despairing eyes, all I could think was that his arms felt like home, and I was about to lose them.

“We can’t fight her, Kenna-lass,” he breathed. Those words I heard, and even if I hadn’t, their meaning was etched all too plainly in his face. “She’s beyond us. But I swear to you, she comes for us, I’ll make her hurt as she takes us down!”

Azganaroth took a step towards us, her six-toed, taloned foot slamming like a falling boulder into the earth.

With that, a noise that registered only as a sharp crack in my ringing ears split the air. Something struck the circle that confined the demon, Christopher, Elessir, and me, making two brief, bright showers of sparks four feet up off the ground. A second later Melisanda violently jerked and collapsed, her sword clattering from her hand and her left leg a torn and bleeding mess. A new wave of energy surged, and though the circle kept it from reaching Christopher and me, the echo of it through my blood was enough for me to identify its source.

Millicent.

Those beams of light were the headlights of Jude’s truck, and the old Warder woman sat perched in the open passenger window, her fedora jammed back on her head and the smoking barrels of her shotgun pointed in the demon’s direction.

I started to think
Oh thank God
—

But that thought went down in flames as Azganaroth seized me in one huge hand and Christopher in the other, lifting us bodily off our feet and out of each other’s arms. Christopher grabbed hold of the limb that had seized him. I felt him lashing out with his power, trying to draw on the very air around him, the air of Seattle, as he’d done with Seattle’s earth. But you can’t sink roots into nothing. His magic scrabbled at the already power-laden air like hands seeking purchase on slick, wet rock. Without avail, and with no effect on the demon other than to make her shake him, almost chidingly, like a mother lion might shake her cub by the scruff of its neck in her mouth.

“CHRISTOPHER!” I screamed for him with all my strength.

Behind Azganaroth, Malandor rounded on the intruding truck and let loose a torrent of power that tinged the night an unearthly red as it flew. I caught a glimpse of Jude, wisely diving down out of the line of fire even as she kept a death grip on her steering wheel, while Millicent scowled at the incoming volley—and as near as I could tell in one fleeting look, stopped it before it hit with a shield of her own.

The demon hauled Christopher in close to her face, close enough to bite right through his neck if she so chose. But she just stared at him with the combined searing blaze of all four of her burning eyes.

Feebly, Melisanda stirred. She shot a stare of agonized loathing towards my uncle; then she shouted something weak and breathless in the tongue of the Sidhe. With amazing speed for someone with a thigh ripped to bloody shreds by a shotgun blast, she crawled for the glowing doorway where Tarrant stood urgently beckoning her closer.

As she’d done with Christopher, so Azganaroth then did with me. With one effortless bend of her arm she drew me so close to her face that her breath poured over me in a hot, sulfuric wave. Her eyes turned their stare of living flame upon me; I couldn’t help looking into them. Falling into them, or so it felt, falling into and drowning in eyes and power as ancient and as primal as a newborn world.

Tarrant jammed his sword back into his sheath and stooped to pluck Melisanda up off the ground as soon as she reached him. With tender care he cradled her against him, and with a burning glare in my uncle’s direction, he stepped through that wavering rectangle of light and vanished. In his wake the doorway shrank down to a single gleaming star; then it too disappeared. As the gate closed down Malandor started, his head snapping around a heartbeat too late, his titanium eyes widening in shock.

Azganaroth rumbled, almost softly, a noise no louder than a semi barreling right past me at a hundred miles per hour would have been. Then without warning and without a word she released Christopher and me, letting us tumble limply to the ground next to Elessir. And with the distinct air of a mountain turning to look at something that’s made it
very
angry, her tail narrowly avoiding slashing open both Christopher’s face and mine, she turned back to my uncle.

Millicent fired a second round.

This time her shot struck home, and as Malandor’s shoulder exploded in a burst of red, the circle of power disintegrated.

The demon leapt.

With the same gargantuan hand with which she’d seized me, Azganaroth plucked the Seelie lord up off the earth and lifted him high over her head. A fifth and final time she roared, the loudest roar of all, and she kept Malandor aloft in her claws even as she leveled her attention back upon me.

CHILD OF MORTAL AND IMMORTAL, TELL YOUR IMMORTAL KIN THAT THIS SACRIFICE WILL REOPEN THE GATE TO THE SOULS OF THEIR YOUNG UNBORN.

My mouth opened. Then it closed. And I just bobbed my head vigorously, unable to think of what to say to a being that was very possibly older than the entire planet and able to break me, Christopher, and everyone else in the immediate vicinity into miniscule pieces besides. Around Azganaroth and her captive the air opened again, this time in a sphere of liquid, lava-orange light that started as a fist-sized ball somewhere around her belly and expanded to engulf demon and Seelie alike. Malandor’s features, white with pain and horror, turned yellow-orange in the glare before the shining ball began to contract as rapidly as it had grown, taking both of them with it.

Only then did my brain reconnect to my mouth. It might have been that last sight of Malandor that prompted it, thanks to the niggling memory of something he’d done back at my house, but the plaintive yelp that broke out of me was rather ridiculous under the circumstances.

“Wait! He’s got Jude’s—”

Just as the sphere of lava-colored light reached the size of a basketball, Azganaroth’s fist punched out from within it. Something small and silver-gray and incongruously delicate dangled in her massive fingers; this, she tossed out towards me. Then her hand retreated. The sphere diminished to an ember that hung in the air before dying away. And I was left to take up in my own much smaller hand what the guardian of the gate of life’s beginning had restored to me.

The wolf’s head necklace.

The night returned to normal
—or at least as normal as a night can get when a hitherto unknown uncle, who just happens to be an immortal, magic-wielding lord of the Seelie Court, has just tried to sacrifice you to an ancient fertility demon.

Remnants of power lingered in the air, though those began to dwindle until I could sense the more prosaic taste of ozone on the breeze, left over from the storm. Only weak moonlight filtering down through the clouds remained to offset the natural darkness; for a few moments, until my vision adjusted, I felt almost blind. And a little deaf too, till my hearing slowly began to recover from the demon’s roars. Small sounds began to reach me, the tentative buzz of nocturnal insects returning to their business now that everything had settled down, the idling of Jude’s truck’s engine, and the tread of running feet closing in fast.